The usefulness of history is not one of those truths that Americans take to be self evident. Indeed, there’s a long tradition in the United States of thinking that our job is to bury the past, not to wallow in it.
“History is bunk,” said Henry Ford; the limits of the past do not and should not hold us back today. This is not just an anti-intellectual slogan from a notorious anti-Semite; it has been a statement of America’s core faith. If the Founding Fathers had not believed that history is bunk, it is doubtful that they would have tried to build something as daring and new as a continental republic. If the Wright brothers had not believed that history is bunk, they would have failed to understand that people were not born to fly. If Martin Luther King had not believed that history is bunk, the thought of breaking Jim Crow through a process of peaceful, non-violent resistance would never have entered his mind.
It is hard to think of anybody in American life less like Henry Ford than Henry Adams. One was a hardboiled industrialist who was profoundly indifferent to culture as well as to history; the other was a cultivated aristocrat and one of America’s most distinguished historians. Yet Henry Adams’ late life masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, is basically a long and complex restatement of Henry Ford’s thesis. After looking back on his varied experiences as a diplomat, journalist, historian, professor and novelist, Henry Adams finally concluded that history can’t be explained — and that the world is changing so rapidly that the experiences of past generations cannot really help people today.
Like a lot of people, I first read The Education of Henry Adams in college, and it didn’t do much for me. It is an old man’s book in many ways; I read it more easily and respond to it more naturally as I near sixty than I did when I was still in my teens. This is not just because Adams’ lifetime of reading and reflection led him to write a dense and complicated book with many layers of allusion and a maturity of perspective that young minds find hard to grasp; it is also a book about something young students don’t really want to think about: the failure of education.
As a grumpy old man, his wife and virtually all of his close friends dead, his political and literary ambitions seemingly frustrated, Henry Adams looked back on what seemed to be a life of missed opportunities. The grandson and great-grandson of presidents, the son of the man who, next to Lincoln and Grant, may have done the most to save the Union by keeping Britain out of the war, one of the most gifted writers in 19th century America, Henry Adams felt that he’d been a helpless spectator most of his life. His experience as a diplomat working for his father in Civil War era London only showed him the futility of diplomacy. His political ambitions collapsed as a wave of populism aligned with plutocracy forced sophisticated intellectuals and lovers of nuance to the sidelines.
What was the point of knowledge, connections, intellectual sophistication? In America, it just makes you an outsider. The hungry barbarian, the crass entrepreneur, the extroverted Philistine will always do better than the neurotic, introverted, pointy-headed intellectual. Forget writing two volume histories of the Jefferson administration; the way to have an impact in the United States is to build a cheaper car.
But Henry Adams’ despair about history is deeper than personal frustration. First, he believes that the historical process itself is inscrutable. The Calvinism of his New England ancestors seems to have left him with an ingrained sense of an incomprehensible and irresistible providence shaping events to an end we cannot understand. For Adams, this expresses itself in what he sees as a flat contradiction between evolution (and more generally, theories of progress) and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the universe is running downhill; this seems to be a fundamental characteristic of matter. In the end the fireworks and excitement will fade. The stars will go out, and the universe will be cold and dark.
Yet evolution seems to suggest that biologically at least we are moving in a different direction. The lobster is more organized than the amoeba; the monkey more complex than the salamander.
In American culture we routinely apply this idea of evolutionary progress to social conditions and institutions. The world is getting better and better as time goes by, and science is the motor of progress. The study of history for the average American is the study of the story of progress: how humanity rose to its present heights from the mud and muck of the past.
But Adams cannot forget that second law of thermodynamics; the universe is slowing down, higher and more complex structures are eroding into simpler, lower energy states as time goes by, and all will be cold, simple and dark in the end. Adams is not so sure that progress is real; he cannot see evolution or progress at work in the process that led from General Washington to General Grant.
It took me a long time to feel the force of Adams’ point of view. But the suspension between a confident faith in progress and a fearful anticipation of a dark future has only become more common since Adams wrote. On the one hand we have the fear of nuclear (or biological or ecological) apocalypse; on the other we have the faith in progress leading humanity to an ever richer, ever higher life. The two interpretations of the historical process exist side by side in our minds, and history does not seem to provide us with the ability to determine which of the two scenarios is most likely to come true.
Adams, I think, concludes that the result of a lifetime of study, travel and experience leaves him unable to choose between these two views of the human prospect. And if all that study and work can’t answer basic questions like this, he says, what’s the point of it all? In Biblical terms, we are back to the words of Ecclesiastes: Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh (12:12).
Adams has another problem with history: it is not only so inscrutable that study it how we may we can never hope to figure it out; it is also moving so fast that the experiences of past generations have less and less meaning for the next. With the dramatic acceleration of the pace of change in modern times, history is becoming steadily less relevant.
This is probably where Adams comes closest to Ford — and to many millions of his fellow citizens. Americans live in the New World, and that world is renewed in every generation. The dreary stories of past failures have no power over us here; our opportunities and our dangers are so different from those known to the past that there is no real point in studying them now. For better or worse, we are on our own.
This may be true one day; in fact, that is my working definition for the Singularity — a time when history stops being a meaningful guide to the human future. But we are not there yet.
Henry Adams came to despair that his experience had any use; yet in the hundred plus years since he wrote, increasing numbers of people have grappled with this distillation of a life — and found it helpful. Adams doesn’t tell me what the future will be like; he does, however, help me to live more alertly and attentively in the present. Thanks to Henry Adams, I have been able to perceive the realities of life in the shadow of the Singularity far better than I could otherwise have done. He’s written a book so wise, so deep, so useful and (after a generation of reading and rereading) so clear that he brilliantly and convincingly refutes the ideas he sought to share.
Henry Ford was wrong: read Henry Adams to learn why.